Artificial Intelligence – An Illusion or a Reality?

Everywhere I turn, I seem to encounter discussions on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Nasscom conference on Big Data and Analytics in June was heavily AI focused. The cover of last week’s issue of The Economist reads “March of the Machines” with a special report on AI. Analytics websites are full of it. So why is the analytics community so upbeat about this technology? While the earlier phase of robotics was primarily driven by the technology community, the analytics community along with the technology one is equally evolving the AI landscape. The reason for this is fundamental: Robotics was about embedding rules into technology to automate processes, while AI is about embedding analytics into the process through technology. In a hypothetical scenario where every process has AI in it,…